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Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Posted By: newland
Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)
DVDrip | Dual audio | English | Subtitles: EN (optional) | 1:44:47 | 718x480 | H264 | NTSC 23.97fps | MP3 128kbps | 1.42 GB
Extra audio track: Excerpts from an interview with Emile de Antonio recorded in 1978 (MP3 128kbps)

Produced at the height of the Vietnam War (at a time when the majority of Americans still supported it), Emile de Antonio's Oscar-nominated 1968 documentary chronicles the war's historical roots. With palpable outrage, De Antonio (Point of Order, Underground) assembles period interviews with journalists, politicians, and key military personnel and international newsreel and archival footage to create a scathing chronicle of America's escalating involvement in this divisive conflict. The savage and horrific images speak for themselves in perhaps the most controversial film of de Antonio's career, and the film he cites as his personal favorite.

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

1968's In the Year of the Pig assembles prime news film to tell the story of Vietnam in the 20th century. It was practically the only record available of the historical reality of Southeast Asia at a time when Americans were bombarded daily with rhetoric about Freedom and the Communist threat. Avoiding an imposed narration, De Antonio simply stacks newsreel and archive footage behind some very good interviews with people like Daniel Berrigan and the late David Halberstam. The footage delineates the efforts of French colonialists to retake control of Vietnam after WW2, and with the help of the United States, suppress the country's attempts to re-unite. When America takes the leading role in the late 1950s the news film shows a succession of puppet tyrants placed in power. Advisors become fighting troops and a faked attack in the Gulf of Tonkin is used as the lever to get America fully involved.
De Antonio obviously guides the footage, playing "La Marseillaise" on Vietnamese instruments as the defeated French quit the country. The show begins with an electronic audio montage of helicopter rotors that may have been the inspiration for the opening of Apocalypse Now. The docu underplays President Kennedy's role in the Vietnam disaster, but the images we see of Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon are highly unflattering. Much of the footage is surprisingly effective, even forty years later. A witness describes the awful spectacle of a Vietnamese monk immolating himself, and then the highly visible Madame Nhu brazenly states that the monks were paid to burn themselves, incited by foreign influences. It's interesting to see personalities like Gerald Ford making grave pronouncements about developments in Vietnam, while Kennedy-era appointees like Robert McNamara visit the country. Lyndon Johnson's sober pledge for 'no wider war' seems so sincere that we have to wonder what exactly mandated the major combat commitment that began in 1965.
The film shows footage of North Vietnam's defenses and the way its entire population is enlisted in the war effort, which in 1968 was considered by many to be subversive propaganda giving comfort to the enemy. In his commentary De Antonio claims that some theaters attempting to show the film were intimidated by vandalism and death threats.
In the Year of the Pig was heavy-duty campus screening fare in the late 1960s. Emile de Antonio again showed great ingenuity in gaining access to controversial news film. It now plays as priceless found footage, a record of history that would otherwise be lost – or suppressed. Network news of later decades, such as coverage of the First Gulf War, is now tightly controlled corporate property.
— Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Regarded as Emile de Antonio's best – and most politically effective – work, In the Year of the Pig was also at the vanguard of American documentaries arguing unequivocally against U.S. policy in Vietnam. The provocatively titled documentary is as much a cool, intellectual work of cinematic art as it is a hot piece of agit-prop. In making a film that conveyed the historical background of the war in Vietnam while also compelling people to turn against American military involvement, de Antonio brought together massive film documentation and daring cinematic form. Pauline Kael's review brought de Antonio public attention. "Taking footage from all over," she wrote, "he has made a strong film that does what American television has failed to do." — Harvard Film Archive

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Having made a fine documentary dramatizing the downfall of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Emile de Antonio has now assembled "In the Year of the Pig," a documentary on American involvement in Vietnam. It will nail many people to their seats.
There are no frills and few ifs, ands or buts about the stinging, graphic and often frighteningly penetrating movie that arrived yesterday at the New Yorker Theater. Adhering strictly to a dove viewpoint, Mr. de Antonio's picture suggests that we should get out of Vietnam fast. To make his points he uses footage culled from international sources, interspersing, with enormous effectiveness, statements on both sides by political and military leaders, as well as teachers, officials and on-the-spot journalists.
Even with its frank slant, the picture is invaluable on two counts. First, it provides a succinct, backward refresher course on our initial Vietnamese involvement, a needed primer for spectators confusingly numbed by the appalling facts of the present. Second, although some of the footage speaks volumes, it is the statements by the men who led us there and those who went there that cut through to the quick.
With some of the unseen speakers, a good bit of the footage is random and sketchy, such as a portion on the French-Indochinese war, which is repeatedly likened to our involvement. Some of the vignettes are memorable, such as one little drama involving white-suited colonials and rickshaw coolies. In another clip, some husky American soldiers cavorting on a Vietnamese beach scornfully profess disinterest in native girls, described as a "bunch of slant-eyed gooks." Commenting on a memorial service for American troops, Col. George S. Patton 3d smilingly recalls them as "looking determined and reverent," adding: "But they're still a bloody good bunch of killers."
One detailed sequence with a clutter of expressionless natives being firmly shepherded by American soldiers is a microcosm of the Vietnam war. But it is the almost unbroken flow of personal testimonies, for and against our military involvement, that will jolt the viewer, ranging from that given by combat soldiers to those by former President Lyndon B. Johnson and President Nixon.
The film ends with the strains of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" while an American unit agonizingly hobbles into a clearing in the forest bearing its maimed and wounded.
— Howard Thompson, The New York Times (Published Nov. 11, 1969)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

While you might expect such a film to be an emotional rant, In the Year of the Pig is actually a very interesting historical movie. Instead of just attacking U.S. foreign policy, in the movie's first half de Antonio presents an almost sober look at how Vietnam had been a plaything of Asian and western imperialism and how, when Vietnamese self-determination seemed to be a reality at the end of World War II, western democracy betrayed the country. First, the French colonials barged their way back into Vietnam, leading to their famous defeat at Dien Bien Phu to Vietnamese nationalist forces in 1954. The resulting truce agreement artificially split the country into the free north and French-occupied south until elections in 1956. But, then, when it became clear that Ho Chi Minh was going to win the election, the west reneged on the accord and installed a puppet regime, continuing the division of the country. This and later puppet regimes were increasingly propped up by the U.S. We, of course, sent in advisors and then troops when these regimes became less and less popular, and the chances for armed popular uprising became greater and greater framing the conflict as a civil war in which we were aiding. But had the French and Americans left Vietnam to its own devices after World War II, the sources of much of the conflict would have vanished.
De Antonio gets around to attacking U.S. military conduct during the second half of the movie, and he frames the war as a David-and-Goliath battle in which he not only asks you to sympathize with the Vietnamese but to realize, as Daniel Berrigan says in his interview, "the war is not working." To tell his history, de Antonio uses a wide variety of news footage and interviews a wide variety of people, including politicians, academics and military and intelligence personnel. The perspective of the Frenchmen interviewed, who had already learned the hard lessons of Vietnam that the U.S. had not, is especially interesting. Of course, it's very debatable whether the U.S. truly learned the lessons of Vietnam, considering current world events. So the history in In the Year of the Pig feels very fresh, tragically fresh.
— Paul Sherman, Turner Classic Movies

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)

Emile de Antonio – In the Year of the Pig (1968)








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